Paths of Fate-Under Control
by Freline
Summary: Ax is back with the other Animorphs, but the results of Visser One s experiment on him soon cause him to fight his friends and to lose his sense of reality. Bringing him back to the way he was quickly becomes the Animorphs most difficult task.
1. Chapter 1

A week after he had returned to his friends Ax was still not sure how he got back. He just remembered that he had suddenly stood in front of Loren´s house after having been gone for several weeks. Of course they had been worried, which made Ax angry, though he had no idea why.

Currently he was sitting in Loren´s kitchen, watching her cooking. He heard the others talking and laughing in the living room and felt that he did not belong to them anymore.

It was like an invisible barrier had been placed between him and the others he used to call his friends. Since yesterday he had constantly to fight the urge to attack them. He slowly got up and walked out in the garden, where he stood looking at the plants, until someone touched his shoulder. He did not even turn around as he hit the person behind him as hard as he could. When he heard a body hit the wall of the house, he smiled and immediately felt better.

He walked away, not bothering to look behind him. An hour later he found himself at the entrance of the Yeerk pool at the mall and had no idea why he had come here. He watched himself going down the stairs, entering the pool complex. As usual there were Controllers everywhere. Normally Ax would have thought of them as the enemy but now he almost felt like he belonged here, which scared him.

He calmly walked up to the entrance of the pool and watched the hosts screaming as they were pulled to the cages, without feeling anything than complete disregard. He tried to remind himself that they were sentient beings, but with little success, his former view on things was twisting. The longer he watched the more he felt like one of these Controllers, even though he had no Yeerk in his head.

Whatever Visser One had done with him, this was clearly the result of it. But as much as he hated this, he also knew he did not have the strength to fight it alone. He needed the help of his friends, but it was unlikely they would come looking for him after what he had done. Without thinking, he aimed his tail on a Hork-Bajir standing next to him, who was hit in the chest and fell to the ground, screaming. The Yeerk slithered out of his ear and one of the human controllers nearby picked it up and carried it to the pool.


	2. Chapter 2

The more time passed, the more Elfangor started to lose hope. The food would only last for two more days and they were still not closer to repairing the engines, but not for lack of trying. He had contacted Earth once and heard about the problem with his brother´s behaviour, which only made him more concerned. He remembered that Visser Three had mentioned something about a project of Visser One, that was supposedly a drug, made to control their enemies without having to use a Yeerk by manipulating the person´s feelings towards thinking the Yeerks were friends.

From what Visser Three had said, before he killed an innocent human controller that had gotten in his way, the project was going well and had already produced successful results on a prisoner. He had not specified the race of that prisoner, but it had to be Aximili. There was no other way to describe his brother´s attack on Rachel, which Loren told him about. The poor girl had to be taken to the hospital with a concussion, but was already on the way to recovery, which was a relief.

Still deep in thoughts, he left his quarters and nearly ran into Temiss in the corridor. She had a smile on her face, which made Elfangor hope there were finally some good news. He had told her to contact as many other resistance members as she could, to stop Visser One´s project at all costs that did not include their lives. She pushed him back into the room and closed the door to make sure no one could hear them, there was no way to tell how many spies Visser One might have aboard the ship.

Then she turned towards him and told him: "I have finally been able to get into contact with the nearest Pool ship. They are not far away and will be here in a few hours to assist us with the repairs." After hearing this, Elfangor smiled for the first time in two weeks.

The pool ship arrived two hours later, the repairs were done much quicker than expected and soon they were on their way towards the Andalite homeworld again. The rest of the trip would take two days and Elfangor ordered everyone, except the members of the peace movement, to not disturb him unless it was an emergency. At first they protested, but after he had used his best expression of Visser Three on them, they complied.


	3. Chapter 3

Rachel opened her eyes and saw Tobias sitting next to her bed, crying. Her head hurt, but she did not know why. The last she remembered was going into Loren´s garden, to call Ax for dinner, after that her memory was blank. She touched Tobias´ shoulder with one hand, causing him to almost fall off the chair he was sitting on. When he saw that she was awake, he pulled her up until she was sitting and then hugged her so hard that she struggled for breath. After a minute he let go again and asked: "Do you remember what happened, Rachel? You wanted to get Ax for dinner, then we heard you hitting the wall of my mother´s house and when we came out, Ax was gone. Did he attack you? He acted so strangely after we got him back."

Rachel shook her head and replied: "I only remember trying to get his attention, but after that everything is black." She laid back into her bed, closing her eyes. Suddenly she felt very tired. Before she fell asleep, she felt Tobias touching her hand, then she heard him get up and walk out of the room. When she woke up again, Tobias was gone.

Cassie and Jake were there instead, both holding an incredible large pile of get well soon cards and presents from almost everyone she knew. The table next to her was full of flowers in glasses. She was happy that so many people thought about her, it were more than she would ever thought possible, the most of them probably from guys who wanted her as girlfriend. Not that she cared much about them, she had Tobias after all. He might not be the most popular boy in school, but right now he was the only one she really wanted to date.

They put the piles on the floor and sat down on the two chairs that had been placed in the corner of the room. They talked, avoiding the subject of the accident, until a nurse came in and asked them to leave. They said goodbye quickly, promising to come back tomorrow. The nurse was soon followed by a doctor, who examined her for about twenty minutes and then finally said: "Well, Rachel, it looks like you are alright now. We would like to keep you for one more night, just to make sure, but if nothing more happens, you can get out of here tomorrow."

She was glad to hear this, she did not want to be out of the fight too much, fearing that she would lose her experience.


	4. Chapter 4

Loren flapped her wings as hard as she could. She only had half an hour left before she would need to demorph and they were still a long distance away from the valley. Arbron, Jara and Ket were not far behind her, they made more noise than a group of elephants on a stampede.

Luckily it was in the middle of the night, so no one could hear or see an Andalite and two Hork-Bajir running through the woods.

She landed in the middle of the path into the mountains, still in snow owl morph and started to change back to human. The others stopped a few metres behind her, leaving her time to catch her breath before she morphed again. They stood there for five minutes before Loren became owl again and continued leading them to the spot between the rocks Cassie had described as entrance to the valley.

They reached their destination after one more hour. Loren guided Jara and Ket to their new home, before she returned to Arbron, who had stood guard in front of the valley. They were both exhausted from their night trip, so they walked until they were a safe distance away before they pulled out the sleeping bags they had brought, put them on the ground and fell asleep.

When Loren woke up again, the sun had just begun to rise over the horizon. The sky was flaming red and gold, it was an incredible sight, which made her wish that Elfangor was here, watching it with her. She looked towards Arbron, to see if he was awake yet, but he had closed all four eyes and was still deeply asleep.

Her stomach grumbled loudly and she searched her backpack for food, but soon realized that she had forgotten to pack anything to eat.

Seeing no other choice, she morphed to bear and walked into the woods. It did not take long before she found a deer and killed it with one strike of her paws. Before she had gotten involved in the war against the Yeerks, Loren would have felt horror at the thought of killing another living being. But knowing that there were aliens that viewed humans as meat, only worth to become hosts, had blurred her ideals somehow.

If she was capable of attacking Hork-Bajir, Taxxons or even other humans, she found that she was starting to become something that she would have hated a few months ago.


	5. Chapter 5

Cassie walked along the tunnel that should lead her to the bug fighters if Arbron´s information was correct. She had not told anyone else what she was planning, they would have tried everything to get her to take them with her and she did not want that. If her plan failed, they still had the chance to keep fighting. She was almost at her destination when they tried to stop her. They did not have a chance, they were knocked out before they realized what was happening. She concentrated and turned into the Hork-Bajir she had acquired.

She stepped into the nearest ship and started to power it up. If her calculations were correct, the firing of the Dracon beam at the pool would destroy it, killing all the Yeerks inside. She smiled as the door started to close and the engines came to life. Just before the door shut completely, something white and brown came flying inside and landed in front of her.

Cassie looked at it and whispered: "I am sorry, Jake, but you can not come with me. I am the leader, I have to do this on my own." She pulled a needle with tranquilizer out of her pocket and hit him with it, before he even had a chance to demorph. She put him outside the ship, where he hopefully would be safe until he woke up, then she took off through the hole above her.

Flying a spaceship was still new to her, even though she had done it before, but it felt like she was born for it. She had soon reached the optimal point for the attack and began to fire. The Yeerk pool was in flames in seconds. The Controllers still alive were running around in confusion, unable to tell what had happened. Fortunately the cages with the involuntary hosts were too far away to be harmed.

Cassie turned the fighter towards Earth as the Yeerks started to follow her. As she was near the ground, she put the ship on autopilot, programming a course towards space, before she jumped out, morphing to bird as she went. The other Cassie, peace-loving and treating sick animals was gone now, she had been gone the moment as she had realized the Yeerks would not stop until they were completely in control of Earth. To stop them, they needed to think like them, that was what Elfangor and Arliss had told her before they had departed Earth and Cassie knew that they were right.

In secret she had used her Yeerk morph for a short time every day in the bathtub at home with the door locked. It had not been pleasant, the Yeerks were deaf and blind, but it had helped her to understand how they thought. They were convinced they deserved to be the rulers of every planet they came across and that was where they needed to be proved wrong. They needed to be shown that coexistence, not parasitism was the correct way to live and Cassie would do everything in her power to make them see that, even if that meant killing if there was no other way. It was war after all.


	6. Chapter 6

Arbron stood in the remains of the completely destroyed Yeerk pool, Cassie next to him. It would take months, maybe even years until the Yeerks could rebuild it, if they were even able to. But they both knew that they had only delayed the enemy, not stopped them. He knew Visser Three well enough to know that he had thought of something like this and put up a back up plan, they just needed to find out what it was.

The others had gone to the Sharing activity at the beach today to try and spy on the meeting of the high ranking Controllers, in the hope Visser Three would be there. Cassie and Arbron wanted to see if there was any sign of Aximili. He had last been seen in the Yeerk pool by some members of the Yeerk peace movement. They had not seen him leave, so had assumed he was still there, but he was gone. They hoped that meant that he was dead, because if he was not, they had a big problem. If he was still alive, the Yeerks would try everything to get all his secrets and in his current state of mind he would probably tell them voluntarily.

At this moment Tobias, who had been chosen to act as contact to the other group, came flying towards them. He started to demorph before he even touched the ground, so Cassie and Arbron immediately assumed the worst. They were right. As soon as he was human again, Tobias said:

"They spotted Jake and Rachel getting too close. The others tried to help them, but they were all caught. The Visser said he wanted to interrogate them himself.

The worst of it all is that Ax was there, in human form. I heard him agreeing to everything the Visser has said, so we can now be sure that the drug you mentioned works and has turned Ax against us. This means that no one of us can go home again, he surely told them everything about us. I have brought the communications device Elfangor gave us from Mom´s house. We must try to contact him, see if he has any suggestions about how we can proceed further."

They did exactly that, but without success. An hour later they had left the city far behind and were flying towards the mountains as fast as they could. They would hide with Jara and Ket until they had a plan to get their friends back.


End file.
